It is easy to be pessimistic about jobs and pay these days. More and more work is being automated away by ever more powerful and capable technologies.

Not only can computers transcribe and translate normal human speech, they can also understand it well enough to carry out simple instructions. Machines now make sense of huge pools of unstructured information, and in many cases detect patterns and draw inferences better than highly trained and experienced humans. Recent advances include autonomous cars and aircraft, and robots that can work alongside humans in factories, warehouses and the open air.

These innovations are quickly leaving the lab and entering the wider economy, bringing new challenges for workers from tax preparers to burger flippers. Many have concluded that the era of large-scale technological unemployment has finally arrived. For these observers, labour trends visible in many countries – declining real wages and social mobility; rising inequality and polarisation; persistently high unemployment – are only going to accelerate as technology races ahead.